thread: 2011-04-25 : We are creative equals
On 2011-04-25, Emily wrote:
Shared world leads story
Here's an approach I took to work with collaboratively created world in our Griffin's Aerie game and prior:
Start with geographic and social landscape markers. Frex, a covenant and dependent village in Greece, a small group of young mages founding a covenant in mountains in the mountains of Romania, a tribunal dominated by the Tremere from long ago and way back. Then flesh them out with people and places we care about. Once we've experienced the world in play, look at the pieces and how they relate and use those dynamics to tease out where the story will head from there.
[By story I mean, the dynamic events that happened. These included conflicts (battles, politics, arguments), growth (building the covenant piece by piece, training apprentices, making friends and enemies in the world), and decay (the collapse of a covenant, corruption and unethical behavior).]
Collaboration means follow my lead
Use the material that you've created together. If your co-players are kind enough to create parallel situations (ie both have strong relationships with their parens), go ahead, play those characters, and use the material you are offered. But if you build a doll house of a world in the corner and don't share it until the end, don't expect anyone to be able to do much with it.
I f'd this up hardcore. Some stories I introduced that failed were grand schemes that came out dribbling piece by piece. They were thinly established and poorly implemented. If that information had been better shared, or based of things created by others, it would have been better intergrated and much more successful. And, yeah, we have rules that do that all over the place now.
Vulnerabilities are opportunities
Places where you see uneven power relations, weaknesses and potential problems are the levers you can use to create strong story flow. Use them! Vincent did so with wild abandon with my mage's abusive parens. But use them with caution. See we are equal but not interchangeable above.
Stick it out until the world is really shared
When ideas clashed about what the world was like, or what we wanted the world to be like, we fell back on our real world social contract of friendship to see us through. By which I mean that we talked it out until we were on the same page, sometimes going through being at odds with one another in emotionally uncomfortable ways. A harrowing experience at the very best, and not one I'd recommend.
